Tag: Why THE VENTURE BROTHERS is TV’s best written series

We lurves us our VENTURE BROTHERS for many reasons, and, yeppers, writing is at the top of the list. In the following article, Jeff Rindskopf of CheatSheet shows how good a writer he is as well:

by Jeff Rindskopf

It takes a lot of talent to make something as deliriously silly as Adult Swim’s ultra-violent Johnny Quest parodyThe Venture Bros.into something that is often genuinely touching. Luckily, there’s a lot of talent and time put into making The Venture Bros., a series that has slowly evolved from a thin parody of Saturday morning cartoons into perhaps the best written series on television.

It’s certainly the most dense. Obscure pop culture references, episode callbacks, and character-based jokes whiz by like bullets in any given episode, far too fast for anyone to catch everything in one viewing. The density of the joke-writing is outmatched by the complexity of the series’ continuity, which routinely turns one-off throwaway characters into important players a season or two down the line. What other series would turn a modern day wannabe pirate or a slightly sociopathic parody of Mr. Fantastic of the Fantastic Four into fully-fledged characters who mature between episodes in unexpected, hilarious, and often vaguely tragic ways. Before the long-awaited season premiere last Sunday, the last episode was the hour-long special “All This and Gargantua 2,” which serves as an impressive showcase for the series’ enormous roster of characters and the creators’ ability to juggle them all somehow.

Of course, the series wasn’t always like this. When the show first premiered in 2003, it was comparatively simple, a straightforward if brutal parody show whose characters were barely one-dimensional — from the self-involved failed super scientist Rusty Venture living in his father’s shadow to the bloodthirsty beefcake bodyguard and airheaded sons he dragged around with him.

In five short seasons, the series has deepened that core cast, often by fearlessly upsetting their status quo with each new season, while building out the supporting cast to include hundreds of heroes and villains — though actual morality is rarely so cut and dry in the Venture-verse….